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Geoffrey's father had gone to be the representative of the Mother Country in one of the distant Colonies, and as the boy had "more brains than body," to quote his house-master, his parents had taken him with them for a time, making a long journey first. When he came home to go to Eton, I found him a much-travelled person, brimming over with a host of new ideas and impressions, though otherwise the same original dreamy boy as ever.

The inches he had added to his height and his chest testified to the success of the experiment on that score, while it was evident that his active little brain and his big eyes had made the most of their opportunities.

"I seemed to be doing lessons all day," he confided to me, "only they weren't lessons out of a book, and they seemed so much easier to remember. I wish I could always learn things by seeing them!" As the Christmas holidays had to be spent in London, I took Geoffrey at his word, and one morning we wandered down to Westminster Abbey for the ostensible purpose of seeing the Coronation Chair. Of course we saw a great deal more, and one visit led to another.

"It's not a bit like a churchyard, though it is full of monuments," was Geoffrey's criticism one morning. "It is just a book about English history right from the very beginning; and please I want you to write it all down; because now I've seen the places and the monuments and the figures, I shall understand reading about them."

I demurred, but Geoffrey had answers for most of my objections, and here is his view of the matter, imparted to me in fragments and at intervals during the day.

"It's not only what I want," he said, "but I know some of the boys and girls where father is would like it too, especially if you put in plenty of pictures. You see though lots of them have never been over here at all, they always call England home, and they all mean to come some day. And of course when they do come they will go to Westminster Abbey, because it partly belongs to them. I am afraid I can't explain it very well, but what I mean is that now I have learned so many new things about the Abbey, I feel as if I understood ever so much more about history; not the dates and the Acts of Parliament and the dull parts, but the kings and the queens, and the important men who really lived and did things. And all those people must belong to every one who is English, no matter where they live, mustn't they? So if you put them all into a book, every one who reads it will know what to go and look for in the Abbey, and they won't feel quite strange when they get inside the doors, because they will see old friends all around them."

Geoffrey's remarks were suggestive, to say the least of them, and as he spoke I could not help feeling that there were other boys and girls besides those across the seas, and possibly some grown-up people too, who would learn to better know and love the Abbey, with its eight hundred years of unbroken traditions, if they could read its story written in simple language and told in a simple way.

That is at once my excuse and my justification for a book which does not aspire to be technical, exhaustive, or very erudite. Critics will find plenty to criticise, especially in the latter part, for I am well aware that with such a mass of material to draw from, much has been left unsaid that is nevertheless full of interest. Many events have of necessity been crowded into a few lines, when a few chapters would not have done them justice, while I plead guilty to having dwelt at greater length on some names than is perhaps warranted by their actual position in history. Broadly speaking, my desire has been, firstly, to consider the Abbey as including the Palace of Westminster, and to weave men and events connected with both into the story; secondly, to try and make clear how wonderfully representative, how all-embracing, is this glorious old Church, with its continual reminder to us that though former things may pass away, new things for ever spring up to fill the empty places.